Posts Tagged ‘Hosni Mubarak’

Civil war broke out in at a least dozen cities in Egypt on Wednesday as Egyptian soldiers and police, backed by bulldozers and helicopters, carried out an offensive on pro-Mohammed Morsi protesters in an effort to put a brutal and quick end to the Muslim Brotherhood opposition’s sit-in protests.

As reported earlier, there are reports of up to 250 people dead and thousands of others wounded or arrested. The Muslim Brotherhood movement now claims the death toll is in the thousands

Whereas Syrian President Bassar al-Assad figured that ignoring the protest movement would break down the opposition, only to use uncivil force after protesters were able to organize, Egyptian authorities decided to use the same tactic as Hosni Mubarak three years ago and shoot at will to break down the opposition.

Mubarak ended up ousted and in jail. Morsi, his successor who was elected in democratic elections championed by President Barack Obama, is in virtual jail, “detained” by the army and held in a secret location.

If the army thought that the Muslim Brotherhood opposition would fall without Morsi, it was wrong. Dead wrong.

After several days of massive sit-ins that have virtually shut down Cairo, the army moved in at dawn. It succeeded in clearing out demonstrators near the Cairo University campus, but protesters used their biggest weapon – massive human resistance – in eastern Cairo, where massive violence was reported.

Clashes also broke out in Alexandria in upper Egypt, Mansoura, Suez, Giza and Rabaa.

Al Arabiya reported that soldiers are besieging the neighborhood of Islamist preacher Mohamed El-Beltagi, who faces charges of incitement and attempted murder. One of his daughters was killed.

In Alexandria, demonstrators set fire to a government building, protesters attacked four police stations in Giza, and eight people were killed in an attack on a police station in Abu Kurkas. Hundreds of demonstrators clashed with security forces and set public buses on fire.

In Rabaa, British reporter Alistair Beach said he saw 42 bodies and tweeted, “Pro-Morsi protesters have barricaded themselves inside upper floors of field clinic as live fire crackles outside.” Three deaths were reported in Aswan, and a pro-Morsi crowd threw a security forces vehicle, with five people inside, off a bridge.

Protesters are using whatever guns they have, along with Molotov cocktails and rocks, to attack security forces.

Islamist mobs set fire to dozens of churches throughout the country. Pro-Morsi supporters set fire to a Christina youth center next to a Muslim youth center in the upper Egypt city of Fayoum, according to Al-Arabiya.

Live gunfire was reported in several cities, but Morsi supporters do not have the arms to match the automatic weapons that soldiers and police are firing to disperse crowds,

Regardless of whether the army wins the war in one day or it goes on endlessly, the violence is further evidence that the Obama administration’s campaign to make the Middle East safe for democracy, and vice versa, is not working.

All the United States and the entire international community can do is wring their collective hands and cry over the violence. Typically, the European Union issued a statement Wednesday that the violence is “extremely worrying,” and it called for restraint from Egyptian authorities.

Egypt is preparing to charge Mohammed Morsi with spying for Hamas, and announced that he is being held under arrest for another 15 days while indictments are being prepared.

Egypt’s official Middle East News Agency (MENA) stated on Friday that Morsi is suspected of carrying out “anti-state acts, attacking police stations, army officers and storming prisons, setting fire to one prison and enabling inmates to flee, including himself, as well as premeditated killing of officers, soldiers and prisoners.”

The announcement came hours before pro-Morsi supporters and anti-Muslim Brotherhood factions were preparing to demonstrate. Not coincidentally, the charges were stated the day after U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called for Morsi to be released because there have been no formal charges filed against him.

The Egyptian military leader, Gen. Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, urged the public to rally on Friday against “terrorism,” meaning the Muslim Brotherhood party that catapulted Morsi into the presidency a year ago.

The charges against Morsi include accusations that he helped stage the jailbreak of dozens of Muslim Brotherhood leaders during the 2011 revolt against the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Several Egyptian media outlets reported that Morsi worked with Hezbollah and Hams to free terrorists from jails.

The Muslim Brotherhood replied on Friday, “The accusations read as if they’re a retaliation from the old regime, signaling ‘We’re back in full force,” according to Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Hadda, quoted by AFP.

Following the military coup that ousted the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei has been appointed interim Prime Minister of Egypt.

ElBaradei received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work as chairman of the International Atomic Entergy Agency (IAEA). And he was one of the Egyptian leaders that led to the ousting of president Hosni Mubarak.

But Israel has a very different and not particularly positive view of the man.

In 2011, Israeli officials made some very harsh accusations against ElBaradei, including calling him an “agent of Iran”, claiming that ElBaradei assisted Iran in covering up their nuclear program. In the past, ElBaradei defended the Iranian nuclear program, claiming it was peaceful.

Eventually ElBaradei”exposed” some information about the Iranian nuclear program and said they “might” be attempting to build nuclear weapons, but Israel said, that none of the information he “exposed” was unknown or even new.

On his part, ElBaradei said there was a perceived double-standard in relation to Israel’s nuclear weapons program and in particular, Israel’s not being a signatory to the NPT (Non Proliferation Treaty). ElBaradei wants Israel to sign the NPT, which would then force Israel to open up its nuclear weapons cache (if it exists) to foreign scrutiny.

Iran is a signatory to the NPT, but that obviously hasn’t stopped them from pursuing nuclear weapons.

ElBaradei told the New York Times in 2009 that “Israel would be utterly crazy to attack Iran”.

In 2011 he also told Der Spiegel in an interview that Israel has a peace treaty with a single man [Mubarak], not Egypt.

Egypt’s defense minister issued Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed Morsi a 48-hour ultimatum on Monday to reach an agreement with the opposition or face a military solution to the violence gripping the country. The ultimatum followed a dictate by the opponents that if Morsi does not quit within 24 hours, they will lead the second rebellion in the country in less than three years.

Defense Minister General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the security of the country is being threatened following the death toll of at least 16 and the firebomb attacks on the headquarters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

The Brotherhood guards fired at attackers, and at least five people were killed.

Al-Sisi insisted he was not planning another military regime, but he did into detail what he meant by a “roadmap” if Morsi and the opposition cannot reach an agreement, which deems to be highly doubtful.

The anti-government protests that reached a peak on Sunday and Monday are the largest since those that deposed Hosni Mubarak for power and ushered in elections that catapulted the radical Islamic Muslim Brotherhood into power.

Morsi promptly tried to usurp powers that quickly turned his administration into a clone of the Mubarak regime, denying freedom and promoting corruption.

The economy has collapsed and the government is nearly bankrupt, providing all of the fuel for another rebellion. The lack of a single leader to attract the support of Egyptians is an indication that the people prefer anarchy, making it ripe for the military to take over as it did in the interim period between Mubarak’s ouster and Morsi’s election.

Morsi told the London Guardian that if he were to bow to opposition demands and quit, protesters would be back in the street within a “week or a month.”

Given the gang rapes of foreign journalists that accompanied the protests against Mubarak and that occurred again this week in the growing rebellion against Morsi, and given the breakdown of law and order and the Muslim war against the Christian Coptic sect, ultimatums and anarchy are the rule of the day in Egypt.

Call me optimistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Egypt’s favorite dictator back in power in the near future. The current protests in Egypt have got Morsi on the ropes, and the army certainly doesn’t appear to be backing him at all.

And why should it?

The country has deteriorated to incredibly low levels since Mubarak was kicked out.

I’m willing to bet the Egyptian people would be glad to have Mubarak back at the reins, and putting everything back where it belongs.

Consider this – after being deposed, Mubarak wasn’t shot or hung. Quite an unusual move, I’d say. Almost as if someone (the army?) wanted to keep him in reserve in case things got really, really bad.

Bad, sort of like where Egypt is now, with only a few weeks of gas left.

Morsi, on the other hand, doesn’t really enjoy that kind of support from the army, or the people.

If a coup happens, you can be rest assured that Morsi will most likely quietly find his end somewhere behind a building, and if Mubarak does come back after his extended sabbatical vacation, the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood members will likely be meeting Allah almost as soon.

I just want to remind (the potentially) returning President Mubarak of one thing. It was Fuad Ben-Eliezer and others in the Israeli government that showed you support and offered you asylum when the going got tough, not America, and definitely not your fellow Arab countries. So when you’re back in power and cleaning house, if you could take care of the Sinai for us and those Gaza tunnels, it would be much appreciated.

Headlines around the world are screaming that Syria, Lebanon and Israel are prepared for war, and that is correct to the extent that every normal country beefs up its defenses in the face of a perceived threat.

But a sure sign that everyone, particular Hezbollah and Syrian President Bashar Assad, are basically huffing and puffing is that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took off for China Sunday night.

It is extremely unlikely that the Prime Minister of Israel would trek off the Far East to promote trade relations if political and military analysts expected war.

Just to make sure Syrian President Bashar Assad understands Israel’s intentions of self-defense by bombing in Syria of Iranian missiles that were about to be handed over to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel reportedly sent him a soothing “don’t worry” message Monday.

Israel has no intention of trying to help the rebels and is not trying to intervene in the civil war, said the message, sent through diplomatic channels, according to the Hebrew language Yediot Acharonot newspaper.

Israel has rarely, if ever, intervened in another country’s political affairs, although critics charge that Israel’s political leaders’ love of American politics has proven the United States to be an exception.

Prime Minister Netanyahu knows full well that it will not relish whoever might replace Assad, termed a “butcher” this week by no less than his former short-lived fair weather friend Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Similarly, Israel uncharacteristically shut up during the Arab Spring rebellion against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The war rhetoric mainly is coming from the other side of the border, with Syrian television even calling on “Palestinians to act against Israel” from the Golan Heights.

However, there are virtually no “Palestinians” in the Golan, where most of those who are not Jewish are Druze.

If Syria meant that the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Syria would cross the Golan Heights border like tourists, of it meant that the Druze are going to fight for Assad, that only shows how much the Syrian regime is living in its own world.

“U.S. policy in the Arab world has long been widely unpopular, to put it mildly,” on Sunday Sarah Mousa wrote in Al Jazeera. Although President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo were met with great enthusiasm, she continues, “the Arab uprisings transformed many peoples’ views on the role played by the US in their region. While Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did offer verbal support to most of the protest movements, hypocritical selective support, initial American hesitation in backing the uprisings and past policies bolstering dictatorships were not forgotten.”

Mousa, a graduate from Princeton University and a 2010-2011 Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, states: “More crucially, it became clear to many that the outcome of the uprisings was up to them, and not to U.S. policymakers. In the case of Egypt, U.S. statements only called for Hosni Mubarak to step down when it became entirely clear that it was inevitable. While the gesture may have been appreciated by parts of the Egyptian opposition, it was not viewed as a significant turning point.”

Obama’s visit to Israel and the PA were received coolly by Palestinians, writes Mousa. “Young activists referred to the speeches as ‘insipid’ and ‘sycophant.’ The part of Obama’s Jerusalem speech that many Palestinians paid most attention to was an interruption by Palestinian audience member Rabeea Eid: ‘Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to see the apartheid wall on your way here? There are Palestinians sitting in this hall. This state should be for all of its citizens, not a Jewish state only.'”

We’ve all seen the clip where, as the noisy Eid was being dragged out of the hall, Obama referred to the interruption as a good display of “lively debate.”

Recordings of the incident quickly spread throughout the Palestinian Internet. Obama’s failure to effectively address Palestinian rage on the student’s points, just as Eid was being dragged away and handcuffed, made him a mockery in Palestinian eyes, argues Mousa.

“The U.S. is increasingly irrelevant to movements throughout the region,” she concludes. “In his March visit to Cairo, Secretary of State John Kerry extended invitations to meet with members of opposition parties. Many turned him down. Distour party member Gamila Ismail explained her rejection of the invitation in a scathing letter to Kerry, in which she criticized self-interested U.S. policy that has supported repressive regimes in Egypt for decades.”

Ismail also wrote Kerry: “This is a revolution that will teach the world, as Obama, your president, has said. And we want to teach the world and be a model for it. And we will become different than what you see. Your embassy reports see that we do not deserve anything except this [limited] amount of democracy. And that this [limited] amount is ‘enough’.”

Interestingly, as America is achieving a steady decline in reliance on Middle Eastern oil, American foreign policy no longer views the region with the urgency it did only a decade ago – and the Arab intelligence gets it.